On the Pure Pleasure of Plot in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt

“After an exhaustion of New Narrative trickling up to mass market autofiction, literary authors are experimenting with genres like crime, thriller, horror,” observed Whitney Mallett, the critic and titular Whitney behind The Whitney Review, in a recent Substack newsletter. A decade ago, she continues, narratively driven work “seemed the least cool and contemporary mode… but lately I’m really here for people taking the risk to do it”; that is, “to earnestly have a go at building a fleeting world that I can emotionally enter rather than just opting to deconstruct.”

Reading her words last month reminded me of a literary rut in which I’d once found myself stuck. It was the end of the summer of 2022, and I’d managed to finally read a bunch of venerated books I’d been meaning to cross off my list for a while. One among them traced itself along a series of thinly veiled autofictional Socratic dialogues, each of them strung together in the hopes of imparting the lesson that friendship can actually be kinda fab. Another was a three-hundred-something-page novel about whether or not its protagonist might someday make a decision. Still another concerned a woman who ran into strangers—and oh, you know they had conversations.

In case my cunty framing doesn’t make it all too clear, these books, in spite of their vaunted reputations, frequently left me unmoved. I now understand why: I was craving a good fucking story; I wanted to read something that made me feel anything, and these works had, by and large, fallen short. I had no idea how badly I was yearning for things like “plot” and “characters” and “settings that aren’t Art Basel” until I picked up Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s breakthrough work of horror published earlier that year. It was gory. It was visceral. It was everything I needed: a book where things actually happened.

And this isn’t to say that Manhunt doesn’t dabble in deconstruction. The book, while firmly rooted in the field of contemporary horror, also very clearly and intentionally engages with the “gender apocalypse” plot, a subgenre of science fiction that includes such notable works as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Lauren Beukes’s Afterland, Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men, Sandra Newman’s The Men, and Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man.

Trans women, as well as trans people writ large, rarely figure very prominently into such stories. And if we do, we are either depicted unfavorably or, at best, as little more than a narrative afterthought: a casualty of a plague that’s spread through chromosomes or hormones. With Manhunt, Felker-Martin subverts this convention, creating a post-contagion world in which trans women (and men and nonbinary people) not only exist but tell the story themselves across multiple viewpoint characters.

As a thought experiment—that is, one in which the author asks what a “gender apocalypse” might look like from a trans woman’s perspective—it’s as intriguing an inquiry as it is a well executed answer, to say nothing of the ways in which Manhunt’s engagement with the greater “gender apocalypse” subgenre calls to mind Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix.”

But it was neither the metatextual nor the theoretical that moved me most of all when I first read Felker-Martin’s book. It was how complexly she explored her characters’ interiorities on the page. It was how sensitively she depicted what it’s like to be rendered inconvenient, dangerous, or worthy of distrust merely by the facts of one’s body. It was how clear-eyed she was in literalizing the unspoken violence that underpins contemporary anti-trans discourse. It was how she made me laugh and cry and grip the sides of my book as I read, my blood pumping with every new body fluid she splattered across its pages.